I absolutely think casuals ruined the game. Back in vanilla, epics were epic. You had to raid through the very first raid in order to be good enough for the next one. Resist gear had a purpose. Rep grinding was rewarding, although not game breaking. You had to travel far and wide for certain profession training. It gave you plenty of things to do, and it made it hard to have more than one character that was actually endgame suited. This formed a sense of character and server identity. Immersion was high back then, and that's what kept ME playing.

Fast forward to today. There is absolutely nothing that keeps me involved besides the same repetitive raid, and the same repetitive heroics. I can make as many alts as I want and get them geared enough to Q raid finder in a week only playing a few hours a day. If you take the challenge out of the game, it is not fun (for me). I don't like games being annoyingly hard (Think Vagrant Story), but I love a challenge and that's one of the reasons I like MMO's. I want everything about one expansion to last the whole expansion. I don't like this whole "Skip the previous patch completely because you can get gear that's better without touching it" thing they are doing. It seems to me, though, games like Everquest, Final Fantasy XI, and vanilla/TBC WoW are a dying breed.

I'm not really saying "The game sucks now! I wont support it!" I quit playing because I got bored. It's not because it's an old game, because I played Final Fantasy XI for six years until it ended up following a similar path as WoW. I played a few months in Vanilla, a few months in TBC, half of WOTLK, and all of cata. I touched MoP, but I didn't even get a character to level cap. Everything is just stale to me.

Slightly off topic:
For example, it's the same reason I keep starting over on Skyrim. Once I get smithing and/or enchanting to 100, the game becomes too simple and easy, so I start over. On this file I'm buying nothing but lockpicks, avoiding smithing and enchanting completely (Although I'm disenchanting), not using trainers to level skills easily, I'm not leveling skills I'm not using just to gain levels quicker (Like Illusion), and I'm not doing silly things to get skills quicker (Sneak against a wall, hit Shadowmere with daggers, etc). It's actually somewhat challenging even on normal difficulty, and I've done more on this file than I have on any other file because I'm having fun with it. I look forward to a quest sending me on a dungeon because I might actually get light armor and sword skillups, instead of thinking "When will this stupid faction questline be over with".

Casual players isn't the right word, "long term bad players" is more the right word... you know, the LFR guys that demand everything is nerfed, or that they should get a full set of pvp gear from simply doing bg's, I think those ones have done the most harm.

Casuals didn't kill WoW, the fact that WoW is 10 years old and there are 10 times more MMO's to play now that are just different enough to be interesting than there were 5, 3 or even 2 years ago, is what "killed" it.

WoW still has 5 times (if not more) subscribers than the next most subscribed MMO out there, how can anyone call that "killed" or "dead?"

The decisions the development team has made over the last 10 years (which includes the decision to cater more directly to the "casual" player) has kept this game going for 10 years, and has made Blizzard one of the most succesful gaming companies in the business. And a lot of the people complaining that WoW is "dead" are still playing it...so it can't be all that bad.

WoW's current model forces out people whose sole source of pride and fun related to this game was the fact that the next person was never [in the then-foreseeable future] going to get the gear and raid invites that they do? Good riddance.

I'm only saying that I see people saying they'll quit if XXX happens or not happens all the time, when he says they're far and few between.

I see those posts all the time too: Remove LFR or I quit, remove epic gear for casuals or I quit, remove titles and mounts from old raids or I quit.

There simply is no comparison between the number of so called hardcore crowd posts where they demanding things be removed or they'll quit vs the number of casuals demanding to have access or they'll quit.

LFR was not made because casuals wanted to raid, it was blizzards attempt to get casuals raiding. Casuals also didn't demand to have purple coloured gear but Blizzard gave it to them anyways so that they could feel special too. Blizzard made these choices not the player base. Yes you have whiners on both sides but the vocal minority on sites like this are the ones threatened that they will no longer be special snow flakes.

Now that blizzard has opened up the can of worms that is LFR and LFD it would be rude to remove it from so many people that enjoy it because of a handful of immature individuals that don't feel special anymore.

WoW's current model forces out people whose sole source of pride and fun related to this game was the fact that the next person was never [in the then-foreseeable future] going to get the gear and raid invites that they do? Good riddance.

? I never was able to get into a good raid guild on WoW. I mostly just PVP on WoW. The concept of it was appealing to me, and if I wanted to start raiding I had to put forth actual effort to raise to the top. While I did join raid guilds, most of them were never any good, and I generally never got to see past the first few bosses. I was okay with that, though. It gave guilds incentive to improve, and they sometimes did.

It's almost like game companies KNOW people like you and RickJamesLich are an irrelevant minority not worth developing toward.

Considering the peak of WoW and FFXI were when the games were actually challenging and immersive, I'd have to disagree. In fact, ever since FFXI started going easy-mode in 2009, it went from a steady 500k sub base for five years down to a staggering 250k.

This is all about hardcores having to share the same oxygen as casuals. This is never about hardcores not having anything to do.

If someone needs so much status from a video game, they must have the self-esteem of a fucking gnat.

Funnily enough, snippets of info from Blizzard employees point out that the flow/cyclic change and replacement of gaming population within WoW itself has been on such a grand scale, that the amount of hardcore-raiding oldtimers still active is very, VERY scarce.

Funnily enough, snippets of info from Blizzard employees point out that the flow/cyclic change and replacement of gaming population within WoW itself has been on such a grand scale, that the amount of hardcore-raiding oldtimers still active is very, VERY scarce.

Yup. There are scores of these threads for every hardcore, and a thousand casuals for each of these threads.

Blizzard only cares about the difficulty as far as they are getting $paid$. There would be NO LFR OR Normal if there were millions of hardcores. There aren't though.

There's a major difference in getting to UBRS on a pvp server at primetime in vanilla, and flying straight into Mechanar in tbc, it only went downhill from there on.

Ahhh I loved the good old days of traveling to black rock mountain. Between rogues lurking around, so having to make a mad dash to the entrance, and raids heading into places like MC, there was always an awesome battle going down.

WoW's current model forces out people whose sole source of pride and fun related to this game was the fact that the next person was never [in the then-foreseeable future] going to get the gear and raid invites that they do? Good riddance.

I didn't get that from reading his post at all. Odd.

Let me ask you this. Is killing an LFR boss as rewarding as defeating one that you've been working on for a few weeks? The whole 'pride' thing has nothing to do with knowing someone else can't clear a given hurdle (or even caring what anyone else does to begin with), but it's more about earning vs. being given an accomplishment.

"Look around you. We're all liars here, and every one of us is better than you" - PB

Ditto for me in Cataclysm. And I got sick to death of seeing the same bosses week in and week, watching the same (otherwise nice) players fail time and again on the same mechanics, and spending 30 minutes at the beginning of each raid trying to hunt down missing players and/or attempting to recruit a semi-geared pug from trade chat and/or friend lists. It's not a fun or social experience. It's the opposite of a game's intended purpose.

You're ascribing motives and actions to me that have no basis in reality. I'm actually pretty good at the game and have always been invited into just about every guild that I've run raids with. I generally top the healing charts across all categories (HPS, Dispels, etc.) and seldom fail at any mechanic. I don't throw tantrums when I don't get the loot I want and I never rage when others struggle with mechanics. I've never cried to Blizzard and I don't expect to gain anything in the game "for free." On the other hand, I am sick to death of the raiding grind and since Blizzard refuses to put anything new into their game that doesn't revolve around raiding I don't see the point in sticking with WoW.

No, I'm just describing the reality. You have always been able to see the end-game with 2-3 nights of raiding. And from what you describe, you were in quite bad guilds. No top guild even on a small server is going to be pugging from trade to fill their raids and then inviting the pugs to the guild. That's what the bottom tier guilds do. And that's fine. Those kinds of guilds have their place, and should have their content. But it doesn't mean they should automatically be guaranteed to get through all the raids in the game. I don't think you understand just how big of a skill gap there is between the kinds of guilds you describe, and the top guilds. You think you're "pretty good", but the reality is that you probably wouldn't have made it in my guild, for example. And that's fine too, you can either raid with groups more suited for you or improve your skills so you can make it in the top guilds. It's just that when you're less skilled and in a less skilled guild, you don't need as much content to fill your playtimes as highly skilled players in well run guilds.

Anyway, the point is that the excuse of "I have wife and kids and mortgage and a supermodel gf on the side" or whatever is just an excuse. You can have all those things while still clearing content. The critical factor is skill. Skill in playing your character, skill in functioning as a member of a group and skill in time/life management. The game should have content for all skill levels (and dedication levels), but it should be different content. Because when you try to use the same content for everyone, you end up with a mess of compromises that really doesn't suit anyone (and as WoW has shown us, lose 2M subs/year).